Unusual Business Ideas That Work

Uncommon Business is a blog about people who make money online selling unusual, strange and sometimes bizarre things or provide curious services. This isn’t “One Hundred And One Ideas For Your Homebased Business” – only real, working businesses with URLs provided, so you can do further investigation on your own. And if you do own an unusual web business, make sure you submit your story to us. SHLD

Saturday, August 09, 2014

Effective Idea Management In Small Groups

Ideas are worthless unless implemented. To make the most of those creative brains on your small team, you can’t have a brainstorming session and leave it at that. You need to have a system in place to manage ideas fr om the initial burst of insight to complete execution.

The Three Stages ofIdea ManagementThere are three essential stages in idea management:Stage 1: Capture/Input Stage 2: Feedback/Analysis Stage 3: Decision/ActionAll three stages are necessary. With a smaller team, you can move more quickly fr om one to another, but you still need to work in the right order to manage ideas effectively.

Stage 1: Effective CollectionThe best ideas are often the ones that sound a little crazy. Sadly, those are the ideas we are most likely to reject because they sound, well, a little crazy. It’s important to create a trulyopen space where all of the ideas can come out and introduce themselves. Welcome all ideas equally in order to keep getting a lot of ideas. Quantity produces quality; let your team members know that all of their ideas are welcome. The more the better. It’s a lot like panning for gold: you have to sift through a good bit of silt to find that nugget.

Takeaway:Make Stage 1 a friendly, open, any-idea-welcome environment. This shouldn’t be the place or time where you analyze weaknesses or discuss budgets. It should be a place where you capture all the ideas, sort them out according to the problem or project they address, and get them lined up for feedback in Stage 2.

Stage 2: Effective DiscussionIt’s important to look at ideas with an eye for reality. An objective discussion, with insight from various team members, is how you determine if an idea goes forward or goes away. Most people will respond with initial negativity to ideas that are new or foreign to them. This is the curse of unfamiliarity, and every innovator has faced it. Establish a few rules for the feedback cycle to keep a balance. You don’t want unnecessary negativity, but you do want smart analysis and objective thinking.Rules might include

outlawing personal criticism. Smaller teams cultivate familiarity, which can bring closeness but can also bring conflict.

requiring specific and evidence-based feedback. Instead of saying, “I don’t think this will work…,” team members learn to say, “I don’t think X part of this idea will work because of Y experience and Z data.”

Takeaway:Stage 2 is a forum which allows the necessary people to camp out around a few ideas and talk them over. Putting guidelines in place keeps it productive, rather than personal, and moves the ideas forward faster into the realm of action.

Stage 3: Effective ExecutionFor each idea, set a time lim it on discussion. While some ideas might require a little more research, do the minimum necessary to make an informed decision. Every moment spent in discussion is a moment taken away from the stage wh ere results happen: execution. Keep discussions from lingering on an idea that just isn’t ready for reality yet. Lower the hammer, quickly and finally. For the ideas that pass, remember these two truths:

1. Everybody likes getting credit.

2. Execution matters more than ideation.

A mediocre idea carried out excellently will accomplish more for your business than an excellent idea carried out halfway. Give credit for the idea by tagging the idea generator as the idea executor.Takeaway:Make a clear decision about each idea, designate an idea leader, give access to the resources, budget, time, and team members needed, and then get out of the way.

The Final Stage: Assessment and RewardAfter a reasonable amount of time, bring the team together to analyze both successful and failed ideas. Was it completed? Executed well? Did it work? If so, give rewards and recognition and look into implementing the idea further, if appropriate.If not, figure out why. Was the idea flawed? Were there problems in leadership, execution, lack of resources? Was there some unknown circumstance that popped up and threw the whole thing off course? The more you understand your idea management system, the more efficient and effective you can be as you continue gathering, analyzing, and executing ideas.

Friday, August 01, 2014

10 Tips To Increase Your PR Tenfold

PR is hard. And expensive. Most of the time, you get nothing out of it. And when your company finally is mentioned in an article, even in a big publication, the results can be disappointing. Like that time when we got a whooping 169 visitors after getting intoZDNet.

Over the past two years, I’ve made a lot of PR mistakes. I’ve also got Bitrix24 into Forbes, VentureBeat, ReadWrite, PCWorld, PCMag, TechRepublic, CIO, ITWorld and 200+ other tech publications. I’ve learned that what you do with the article AFTER it’s published is frequently a lot more important than what do you before. And I am happy to share my insights with you.

1.Pay for LinkedIn Inmail.

LinkedIn Inmail is the cheapest and most effective way to pitch journalists. My account cost me $100 a month and at least 50% of all mentions of Bitrix24 in the press are results of LinkedIn pitches. The most amazing thing about LinkedIn is that once you find one or two journalists, their network will actually show you who else to contact –editors in the same or other publications. It saves you a lot of time. Also with Inmail the results are guaranteed, you pay only for those messages that got read by their recipients.2.Contributors are better than editors.

Publishing industry is about pageviews – that’s how advertising is sold. To get pageviews, you need content. To get content, you need to pay journalists. That’s exactly why a lot of publications now - we are talking about Forbes, Entreperneur or Inc here – have blogger/contributor sections. Free content. Your competition and traditional PR agencies are pitching editors, who receive dozens, if not hundreds of proposals every day. My personal experience suggests that contributors and experts are actually much better ‘targets’.

3.Twitter stalking

After you get to know most editors who cover your niche, you should start following their Twitter accounts. When you see a tweet that you can meaningfully respond to or comment on, do so. If you consistently comment and retweet someone’s account for 2-3 months, they’ll start noticing. Now you can pitch. Hint – the best way to do this is with a question.

4.Pitch in multiple formats.

The same data can be presented in multiple formats – report, infographics, slideshare presentation, webinar, video and so on. Last Christmas we did a report about social intranet use. We first pitched it as a study that got picked up by major tech publications, likeReadWrite. We then releasedinfographicsbased on the same data and got a score of mentions again. I now know that I should also include podcast and videocast friendly materials in my pitches (you can’t easily show infographics in a podcast, and podcasters are almost universally overlooked).

5.Content amplification (free).

We’ve got mentioned in Forbes twice, both times by contributors.One articlehad 50,000+ views within the first week.Another onegot less than 2500 views in the same period of time. Why the difference? Reddit and StumbleUpon. Your corporate Twitter and Facebook are a given. Make sure you submit articles that mention your product or service to Digg, Reddit, Delicious and other free content amplification tools to drive more traffic to them. You won’t always have 100% success rate, but when your articles get picked up by Reddit or StumbleUpon, the results are amazing.

6.Content amplification (paid)

If you can’t get your content amplified for free, don’t worry, there are services likeOutbrain(what we use) orTaboolathat let buy amplification. There are several instances when using them makes sense. Some publications rank articles according to pageviews. By driving traffic to your article, you get more pageviews, ranking it higher. Another instance is when your old article got tapped out and is buried so deep no one can see it.

7.SEO

Let’s face it – Google likes Forbes.com a lot better than your site or ours. You can use that to your advantage. For hypercompetitive phrases like ‘productivity tools’ or ‘collaboration tools’ where our own website has no chance of getting to the front page results, we use SEO (links with anchor text and social media mentions) to improve ranking of articles that mention Bitrix24. Not only it’s easier to improve SERP results for high authority domain, people trust publications a lot more than vendors sites.

8.Giveaways

When we launched the service, we decided to make it free to startups for a year but journalists weren’t interested in covering this. So we changed our PR pitch toBitrix24 announces $1.2 million grant program for startups. Than minor tweak made all the difference. We also routinely partner with other publications for giveaways (last time we raffled awayParrot AR.Droneto TWN readers). Many publications are happy to promote your giveaways for free, some charge sponsored post free, but the advantage of giveaways is that you can run them all year around, and not wait for a new release or major product update to contact editors.

9.Lists

There are two ways to get onto lists. First way is to find a year old article and contact the author, asking if he or she is planning an update. That’s how we got onto PCMag’sBest Free Web Appslist. Another way is to hire a guest blogger to write and place a list for you in a blog that accepts such posts (see9 Best Free Business Productivity Tools For Startups), I highly recommend Maricel Rivera ofSourcingPen.comfor the job. The best thing about them is that lists beget lists. When I see our service mentioned on a list that I did not solicit, most of the time I know which older list was used as an inspiration.

10.Promote others

I try to mention as many other tools and services when promoting Bitrix24 as possible (lists make this easy). Even when these services partially compete with us. Most social media managers are very happy to retweet any article that mentions their brand. A lot of time they’ll link to the article from their website or social media pages too. Hey, the more qualified traffic, the better.

There are actually a lot more techniques that we used to improve Bitrix24 visibility and drive traffic to our website. And we’ve increased our ROI by a lot more than 10X after we dumped our last PR agency. Unless we are running a big promotion, our PR related expenses are around $500 a month, and we get 10-20 new articles mentioning Bitrix24 during a typical 30 day period. Our last agency cost us $7000 a month and delivered no results.

If you want ‘predictable’ and affordable PR, here’s what you have to do. First, contact journalists directly via social media with short pitches, not press-releases, and try developing relationships with them over time. Second, keep looking for new formats, because you aren’t Google and nobody cares about your new release. Third, develop a solid post publication strategy to squeeze out as much traffic from each article as possible. Finally, concentrate on ‘grassroot PR’ activities that improve your chances of being mentioned in media, without you pitching them directly.